To view The Devil and Daniel Webster click here.
The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941) exists outside the conventions and formulas of typical Hollywood genres, vexing those critics and writers who like to categorize. Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel of FilmStruck, the film does not belong to horror, melodrama or historical drama, though critics have touted it as a combination of all or part of those genres.
The film does have an aesthetic and narrative context, however; it fits perfectly into an American art movement known as Regionalism. Regionalists, who emerged during the Depression, focused their attention on rural life as a significant part of America’s culture and history. A trio of painters dominated the era: Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood, whose iconic American Gothic is so well known that its original meaning has been lost to the art history books.
I don’t know if Regionalism directly influenced producer-director William Dieterle, but a connection definitely exists between the art movement and the film. That connection is Stephen Vincent Benet, a poet and writer who used American legends, folktales, songs and history as the basis of his work. Like Benet, the Regionalist painters often drew from American legends and folk stories for subject matter. It seems inevitable that Benet and the Regionalists would team up, and they did. John Steuart Curry illustrated Benet’s most famous work, the epic narrative poem “John Brown’s Body.” It was Benet who penned the Faustian short story “The Devil and Daniel Webster” on which Dieterle’s film is based, and it was the director who hired him to cowrite the screenplay.
First published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1936, “The Devil and Daniel Webster” tells the story of a young farmer, Jabez Stone, who has experienced a string of bad luck. His solution was to sign away his soul to the diabolical Mr. Scratch, a folksy euphemism for the Devil, in return for seven years of prosperity. The original story begins when payment to Mr. Scratch is due. Jabez begs legendary lawyer Daniel Webster to use his famed oratory skills to break the deal. Mr. Scratch summons up a jury of the damned to hear the case, and he coerces Justice Hathorne, the judge from the Salem witch trials, to preside.
For the film version, Benet shifted the focus from Webster to Jabez Stone. While the original story mentioned a wife and children, Benet further developed Jabez’s saintly wife, Mary, and added a precocious son and a wise mother to the screenplay. The movie focuses on the path of Jabez’s moral decline as he lets his new success and materialism pervert his good nature. He neglects his family, exploits his neighbors’ misfortunes for personal gain and falls prey to the temptations of housemaid Belle. The trial for Jabez’s soul provides the climax to the film.
The trial showcases the acting skills of Edward Arnold as the cool, collected Daniel Webster and Walter Huston as the wily Mr. Scratch. Originally, Thomas Mitchell was cast as Webster, but, about six weeks into production, with most of his scenes already shot, Mitchell was thrown from a horse-and-buggy, fracturing his skull. Arnold took over the role with only one day’s notice, though viewers will not guess that from his skilled performance. Huston’s portrayal of Mr. Scratch reveals why he was so well respected during his career and why he was Oscar-nominated for this role. In his felt hat and fuzzy goatee, Scratch is at once likable and malevolent. At times, he is a more appealing character than Jabez, but look past his folksy charm, and you can see that his eyes glitter with malicious intent.
The story takes advantage of the tropes of American folklore surrounding the Devil. According to the opening title card, this is “a story they tell in the border country where Massachusetts joins Vermont and New Hampshire.” In folktales, borders are akin to thresholds or gateways, where evil dwells or emissaries from Hell can slip through. While many reviewers and critics noted that the story takes place in rural New England, where straight-talking Yankees tolerate no nonsense, I didn’t read one account that mentioned the name of the hamlet—Cross Corners. Fans of blues legend Robert Johnson will recognize the meaning of the crossroads: If you want to change your luck, you go down to the crossroads and sell your soul to the Devil.
The Devil and Daniel Webster captures the peculiar tone and atmosphere of folktales and lore. The atmosphere is not scary, or haunting, as in a horror film; it’s an uncanny, or eerie tone that occurs when a touch of the supernatural slips into the everyday world, and the characters accept it as possible—even normal. Thus, the mystical parts to the story involving the Devil are blended with Jabez’s earthly troubles, particularly the crisis he causes in his marriage to Mary. The scenes involving Jabez and Mary are depicted like melodrama. Trapped in her domestic situation as wife and mother, Mary suffers as her husband’s priorities change. She watches helplessly as her husband is transformed into a cad by his desire for Belle, the exotic housemaid who suddenly shows up “from over the mountain.” Jabez is not a typical Hollywood protagonist, because he is not heroic in the classic sense. As often occurs in folktales, he is the protagonist in need of a moral lesson. At first, he whines and gripes about his bad luck, then he makes a bad decision with disastrous repercussions for his wife and family. When he realizes the error of his ways, he begs Mary to forgive him. It is Mary who gains our sympathy, not Jabez. His moral decline turns him into a greedy, unlikable rake with a streak of violence and cruelty, reflecting the undercurrent of darkness in The Devil and Daniel Webster.
The Regionalist painters who turned to American legends, history and tall tales for subjects also captured the darkness that is part of our agrarian or rural heritage. Regionalism is often mistaken as an expression of nostalgia for America’s past. But, the echoes of violence in the stories depicted by Thomas Hart Benton, the severe stoicism expressed in the paintings of Grant Wood or the vicious passion of John Steuart Curry’s historical figures belie simple nostalgia. The Regionalists may have embraced rural culture and themes as the backbone of America but they did not retreat from depicting its darker impulses. Check out Benton’s “A Social History of the State of Missouri,” which he did for the Missouri State Capitol: Alongside the grain elevators, hearty pioneers and hard-working men, Benton included a lynching in addition to a white man using whiskey to barter with (i.e. exploit) a Native American.
Benton’s interpretation of American history and lore is echoed in the climactic sequence of The Devil and Daniel Webster, again exposing the movie’s dark undercurrent. During Webster’s oratory to free Jabez from his contract, he argues that an American citizen cannot be forced into service for a foreign country, meaning the Devil is an outsider and Hell is a foreign land. But, Mr. Scratch takes exception to this, claiming his enthusiastic participation in American events: “When the first wrong was done to the first Indian, I was there. When the first slaver put out for the Congo, I stood on her deck. Am I not in your books and stories and beliefs, from the first settlements on?” To this he adds, “‘Tis true the North claims me for a Southerner and the South for a Northerner, but I am neither. I am merely an honest American like yourself—and of the best descent—for, to tell the truth Mr. Webster, though I don’t like to boast of it, my name is older in this country than yours.”
Susan Doll